Cures for Hunger (29 page)

“I can find one.”

Four days later, as I boarded a Greyhound, my stomach knotted. Countryside scrolled in the windows, the landscape and motion I loved. I tried to make sense of my life, to find a trace of the purpose my mother had described so often.

I made up stories for other passengers, inventing a more interesting
childhood. At one point, another adolescent ruffian chimed in about his own tough upbringing. The competition started, and eventually he tried to convince everyone that, because of a series of motorcycle accidents, all his tendons had been surgically replaced with metal cables. The adults yawned and went back to staring out the windows with the half-lidded eyes of the incapacitated: operated patients waking from anesthesia, boxers roused after knockouts, zoo carnivores in musty cages.

The sun was setting above the distant mountains, evening tilting in the sky.

To sleep, I unlaced my shoes and huddled against the window, the vibrating glass cool on my forehead. When I opened my eyes, the dark landscapes dropped away from the highway, mapped out by distant house lights like fallen constellations.

 

 

“How about that one?” my father asked, motioning with his chin to a small SUV, a red and white GMC. “You can pay it off.”

“But I don't want to work for you.”

“What do you expect? To get money for free? Come on. I'll help you buy it. You can do deliveries. It'll be like you're working for yourself.”

We stared at the freshly washed SUV, its panels gleaming beneath the June sky. I sensed a trap, but I was desperate for cash.

“Let's take it for a spin,” he said and elbowed my arm.

He slipped behind the wheel as I got into the passenger seat. He turned the key and pulled out from the parking space into an empty lot behind the dealership. Then he slammed the accelerator and the SUV raced forward, its engine humming smoothly. He swerved side to side and cut an arc like a prankster scorching a doughnut. He hammered the gas and we lunged, my stomach left behind, everything at our sides a blur as we neared the weedy border of the lot. He jammed the brakes, and the SUV lifted on its shocks, tipping its nose to the ground so that I felt as if I were being catapulted from my seat and put my hands against the dash. The tires screeched but caught, and the air instantly reeked of burned rubber.

He turned to me, the grim humor on his face hardly discernible from rage.

“The goddamn thing works,” he said. “Let's quit fucking around and buy it.”

That evening, in a Greek restaurant hidden from the highway by an ivy-grown wall, he asked about my plans. I explained that I wanted to do my last year of high school, then travel and write. I'd been gone only nine months, but he listened intently, as if I'd earned his respect. Or maybe he knew how easily I could leave now that I had a license. What I kept to myself was that I questioned the importance of finishing school since I didn't plan on going to college. I refused to be a dropout, but I didn't want to sell out, either. Real writers didn't go to college. I wasn't sure where I'd heard that, but it sounded right.

“And what about this summer?” he asked. “Maybe you could do some training.”

“Training?”

“Yeah, boxing or something. You'd be good at it.”

“That could be okay,” I said warily.

“You're made to be a fighter. You're like me that way. I could've taken on the best. That's one of my regrets. I should've been professional. Instead, I fought in prison . . .”

He hesitated, his eyes on my face, as if he were trying to decide whether I was interested. I had the sense that he'd been waiting for me to get back so he could tell stories. Finally, he began to speak, his gaze becoming vague and disconnected.

“I remember this one prison in California. The inmates were fucking tough. It was after Miami, and the police had driven me there. I had some bad fights, but I could handle those guys. I really tested myself. There were never enough beds or blankets, and each night we fought over them. Sometimes, inmates got food from the outside and hid it, and if the screws—the guards—found jam or honey, they smeared it on the beds. Rats crawled over the men at night and ate the mattresses and blankets.

“Those guards,” he said, “they were like a gang. They didn't look much different from inmates, and they used to take prisoners into small
rooms and beat them until they couldn't stand. I'd insult them. ‘I'm federal,' I said when they threatened me. ‘You fuckers can't touch me. You'll all lose your jobs if anything happens to me.'

“It was true. I was in for a federal crime, and the police knew I had other crimes under my belt. They wanted to find out what I could tell them. There was a lot they could learn by making me a deal.”

He paused and explained how the prison had been near LA, on the San Andreas Fault. It looked like an old brick warehouse, and with each tremor, the walls rippled, bricks swimming in their weave, dust deepening the air. The inmates stared in terror at the ceiling. My father searched for words to describe the faces of men ruined by guards, the quakes that came too frequently, even the small ones moving the walls like a tapestry beneath a breeze.

“Damn it,” he said, his voice grating, “we were just waiting for that ceiling to fall.”

He was staring through me. I'd forgotten how alive he could appear. The anger he'd harbored on my last visit seemed gone, replaced by an emotion I tried to identify, his gaze at times sad, at others restless.

“But the worst fight I had was in the prison where they sent me afterward. A man threatened me. He said he'd put me in the infirmary. He said it at lunch, in front of everyone. If an inmate did that, you had to act. It was a question of honor. You didn't have a choice. If someone tries to make you look bad, you have to take him down.

“After lunch, I followed him to his cell. He was a big man, but I'd been a fighter my whole life. I really could have been a boxer. I went in and slammed the cell door behind me. The doors were left open after lunch, but once you closed them, only the guards could open them again. I beat the shit out of him. I was punching and kicking him and got him down on the floor and kept kicking him and he crawled under the bed. Then I bent and took his foot and pulled his leg around the metal post of the bed frame and kicked it. I heard the bone snap. It must have broken in two or three places.”

He looked at me and raised his eyebrows and sighed. The question of his life was there, in his expression. Why did that violence, that ugliness, the desire for risk and challenge, hold such sway over us?

“I guess a lot of my fights were pretty bad,” he said. “One time, this guy disappeared with the money from a job we did. He was supposed to hang on to the cash while it cooled off. When I caught up with him, he was coming out of a bar. It was at night, and no one was in the parking lot. I hit him with a baseball bat. I really let that fucker have it. I don't know how many times. Then I went and changed my clothes . . .”

“Why?” I asked, sensing that he was adrift and unable to make sense of his own story.

“Because bats cut the skin. I had blood all over me. I changed, then called the police. I watched while they took him away.”

“Why did you call?”

“Because the parking lot was out of the way. I didn't want the son of a bitch to die.”

“Did he?”

“I don't think so. I didn't check on him, but I don't think I hurt him that bad. He probably just never danced again.”

He tried to smile, and I had to keep myself from looking away.

“But he could have died later,” I said.

“I don't think so.”

“Did you check?”

He shrugged. The story's violence had infused his posture. He sat hunched, fists against the tabletop. Again I wondered what made us need to go too far, to push at everything. I felt the impulse even now, wanting to test him. I asked a question I'd asked years ago.

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

He jerked his head back as if I'd taken a swing, and looked away fast. “No. No matter what I did, I had principles. I wouldn't kill. And I always made sure the people I was working with understood that. One time, a guy wanted me to do a job. He told me I had to get rid of a night guard. I wouldn't do it.”

“Why not?”

He lifted his shoulders, not a shrug so much as an annoyed jerk.

“I didn't want to be the guy who took away someone's father,” he said. “But hurting people was hard to avoid. It happened. It had to. I never planned to, not unless I needed to keep someone from shitting on my
reputation. I grew up with nothing, and my reputation was all I had. Most of the time I was just protecting myself, or someone showed up where he wasn't supposed to be.”

The waitress took our plates and left, and he watched the tired to-and-fro of her hips.

“I keep that baseball bat in the truck,” he said, “under the seat. I have a glove and a ball, too. In case the police ever check, it has to look as if I actually use them to play baseball. If something happened, it's the only way they'd believe it was in self-defense.”

I recalled the day he'd put the bat in my hands and told me to get the money, the pregnant girl at the door. He was fifty-two now, still stuck in that old way of being. I wasn't angry at him, but I didn't know why not. I felt watchful, eager to understand not just him and everything he'd lived, but also myself and my future. Anger would just obscure all that and slow me down.

He looked me hard in the eyes and smiled, as if nothing made him happier than my return. “Come on. What the fuck were we saying?”

“What?”

“That you should train! How much do you think it would be?”

He took his wallet from his jacket and threw five twenties on the table.

“Find a gym,” he said. “Just tell me if you need more cash.”

Later that night, I couldn't sleep. What drew me here? Why was he the one person I had to understand—who held so much power over me? My thoughts fell back through conflicting, coexisting memories: the valley and its fields, fishing or working in the sunlight, the day we walked together through rows of trees and he urged me to step forward, to face the dead bears. When our family fell apart and we left the valley, I began to hate him. Then, briefly, I saw freedom in him, a way of being that was bigger, more alive, and I returned, dreaming—the two of us lifting immense pistols, our fists muscular, the silence a crescendo, the scene around us soon to rain down like shattered glass.

JACK KEROUAC DREAMS ELIZABETH BENNET

We'd packed an order of salmon fillets in Styrofoam boxes and were standing in the fenced-in yard behind the store, my father, myself, and Karl, a man who did odd jobs. Short and gruff, Karl had a blond Fu Manchu, a prominent forehead, and a squint that made his eye sockets appear rectangular. His gaze wandered as he described a murder he'd heard about. A bunch of thugs had been hired to knock off a one-legged Vietnam vet.

“This guy was lively. He split wood every day. He didn't give up because he'd had his leg shot off. You could see him out there hopping around, but his wife was a lazy bitch and wanted his money, so she hired some guys to kill him. But they went too far. They could have just done the job and kept it simple, but they acted like they were in a movie or something. One of them even bought a laser sight for his gun. That was taking it too far.”

His boxed-in eyes held a disturbed, glazed look, and my father and I glanced at each other. It sounded as if Karl had been at the scene.

“Anyway,” he sputtered, his eyes roving and looping. “They shot that poor guy to pieces. It just wasn't necessary.”

After Karl had said good night and driven off, my father and I locked up.

A truck from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans pulled in as we were leaving, and an officer got out, a man so lean that not even his uniform gave him substance.

“Mr. Béchard?” he asked in the tired voice of a telemarketer.

“Yeah, that's me,” my father said with total nonchalance.

“If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to take a look around the property.”

“It's all closed up for the night.”

“Would it be possible to open it?”

My father shrugged and undid the padlock on the gate. Behind it, two large German shepherds began to bark and jump against the chain link.

The officer jolted, as if waking up. “Hey, can you put those dogs away?”

“Put them away?” my father repeated, lifting his eyebrows. He appeared surprised, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “My dogs? There's no place to put them.”

“But how can I go in?”

“Oh, they're not mean. Just open the gate and go on in.”

My father stepped aside, motioning with his hand as if ushering a royal visitor. The dogs had their forepaws in the links. They snarled, black lips pulled back from their teeth.

“Just go on in,” he repeated, sweeping his hand again.

The officer contemplated the two beasts. Propped on their narrow hind legs, they stood almost as tall as he did, as if my father kept werewolves as watchdogs. The man sighed.

“I'll come back later,” he said. Then he got in his truck and left.

“Jesus, can't you get in trouble for that?” I asked.

My father frowned and turned his palms up, as if my question were stupid.

“You don't think I deal with this all the time? I've bought from the Indians for years, and I've never been caught. Don't be so nervous. Those guys don't have the balls to catch me. How are they going to get me when they're afraid of dogs?”